Golden Shimmering

         She found the golden shimmering thing between the rubble-brim of the dirt road and the rut of a spent explosive.  Fatigued eyes thickening in disbelief, then the stolen potatoes dropped and forgotten.   Hesitantly, reverently, her nine fingers worked the thing free from the minefield’s edge.  Shame furrowed her gaunt features as her skin contacted with this undefined preciousness.  The girl grieved freshly, selfishly for her schoolteacher mother; she could have named this, given a word for such beauty.  Memories of her father’s joyous paeans – now marred by his Kalashnikov-broken face being swallowed in the truck’s darkness – these bitter-sweet dreams reminded her that paradise, somewhere, was colored such as this –

         The golden shimmering opened its eyes.

         She would have dropped it, had not one of many tiny hands closed around her finger.  Her own hands now could feel every intricateness, the contours of each wing, the multiple pulses of its appendages blossoming out like the rays of a sun.  The girl lifted her head toward the sky; the moon remained hidden behind the permanent cordite-haze as aircraft invisibly screamed through.  But still, in her hands, the golden shimmering threw off heat and light enough to fill the girl with something even her mother could not have described.  Its eyes echoing inside her mind, calling forth other gazes: her dog’s last look before he was butchered; her youngest sister staring at her stomach, distended to the point of rupture; her infant son’s rummy-gaze as he struggled for three useless days to suckle from her withered breasts. 

All these visions of loss, murky images now shiny as polished glass, reflected back to her through coursing veins of silver, myriad layers of radiance.  Grimly sparkling beauty, as powerful and filling as food – sustenance enough to last a lifetime, or at least until morning . . .  

         She cradled the golden shimmering back to what was left of her village.   She alone delivered the killing blow.

         The delicate body boiled for most of the night before the flesh fell away.  It's hair, skin, blood congealed into sterling strands and bullion vellum.  After days of nothing but rotten tubers, the children vomited the first bowl.  The girl patiently separated meat from bile and served it again, so that not a bit would go to waste.   Her father’s melodies and her mother’s words rang through the speck of firelight burning against the languid sunrise, as the girl sang in gratitude for the golden shimmering gift she had received.